A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  Adonis

  It’s a bloody lie. They all lying if they say I stole the bullet mold and gave it to Galant. He was always against me, that Galant: remember how he attacked me with the axe when Bet was new on the farm. Did he think I’d forgot about it? Now he wants to put the blame on me. We only found out about the mold after they was gone. He must have taken it himself. I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to know either. My Baas was always good to me. What will become of me without him?

  Cecilia

  In the darkness before dawn, awakened from the dream (always that dream), I heard something in the kitchen and found, when I went to investigate, Pamela standing at the back door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She started and swung round to face me. “I—I’m just going out, Nooi,” she stammered. “My stomach is upset.”

  “I’ve been hearing you moving about all night,” I said. “Are you ill then?”

  “No, Nooi. It’s just the stuffiness, I think.”

  “Well, go then. And bring me the tub when you come back. It’ll soon be light.”

  She went out. It was a strange feeling: an awareness, for the first time, of her not as a slave, as the servant who’d attended me all my life, but as a woman. Her restlessness was no doubt caused by Galant’s absence. I almost envied her: if only I could be so concerned about Nicolaas. It made one look at things in a new light. They can give one so much trouble, always underfoot like domestic animals; yet somewhere, it seems, lurks a strain of human feeling.

  If but she could restrain her baser nature in my husband’s presence. Then that child would not have been lying in its wraps to shame us all. But they have an animal cunning that guides them, knowing exactly how to provoke the weakness of a man.

  I remembered the dream again. Thank God Pamela had awakened me before it had run its usual course; even so it was enough to make me feel sick. How often it had returned to me in my life, innumerable variations of the same nightmare. I would be alone somewhere, sometimes in the veld, or in the house, in a shed, or wherever; and then I’d become aware of another presence. I never saw his face; only that he was black. I would try to send him away, but each time I was unable to utter a sound. My throat would constrict as he came closer. Then I’d try to shout, knowing no one could hear me for there still was no sound. In another moment he was tearing the clothes from me and forcing me to the ground where he would grapple with me and perpetrate unmentionable horrors on me. “Please kill me,” I would plead with him. “For God’s sake, I’d much rather be dead.” Anything except what he was doing to me. It was the worst that could possibly happen to one.

  And when at last I would wake up from the dream, feeling more nauseatingly besmirched than with mud or slime, I would immediately get up to wash myself, my whole body, scrubbing and scouring, yet unable to rid myself of the stain of that memory. And usually it would take days before I felt I could face Nicolaas and the world again.

  It had been the same that night; but Pamela had averted the worst and set me thinking. In the early dawn, after I’d washed myself in the tub and long before the farm stirred to life, I went to the outbuilding we’d prepared for the schoolmaster and his wife and sat down in the part we’d partitioned off with a cupboard to form a schoolroom for Helena. I took the Bible on my lap, but I didn’t read. For a while I paged through it, but soon gave it up, leaving the book open on my knees. That in itself restored a measure of peace to my mind.

  Perhaps the dream was a visitation of God, I thought, to make me reflect on the grudge I felt towards Nicolaas. God had given us three daughters; it was clearly His will for us not to have sons, and if I continued to murmur against it I might be responsible for driving Nicolaas deeper into sin. I should be more humble in future.

  In his absence, as in October when he’d gone to Cape Town, I usually felt more composed, more contained (except for the dream): then I was in charge, and house and farm would be run according to my wishes and my orders. There would be nobody else to defer to. But this time, that early Sunday morning! I had to admit that I was lonely too. Perhaps it was only natural: God has made man upright so he couldn’t easily touch another at his side; loneliness is his condition. Yet there is comfort in the knowledge of another existence next to one’s own.

  In the restlessness of a slave woman unable to sleep because her body’s urge for a man had kept her awake, and in being saved from the worst of my dream, I’d learned to face again something of the nature of my own need.

  Outside, the children came running from the house, filling the yard with their shrill voices. I picked up the Bible and went to the door of the schoolroom to assume my responsibilities for the day in the name of God.

  Verlee

  From the beginning Martha had been against the idea of returning to the interior. Life was so much easier and safer and more enjoyable in the Cape she’d known since birth, she said. And all her relatives were there. But their very proximity added to my resolution to leave. Ever since we’d got married—a decision not taken lightly after I’d been on my own for forty years—her family had been around to admonish and advise; and the birth of the baby had made it immeasurably worse. Which might account for my rather precipitate acceptance of Van der Merwe’s offer to become schoolmaster on his farm.

  Almost all the way from Cape Town she sat crying in the wagon, which upset the child too. Fortunately things improved somewhat once we’d reached the Joostens’: at least he was a distant relative of hers, and his wife knew remedies to ease the child’s colic. During the two weeks we spent there Martha grew more resigned to her lot, but she still didn’t say much when we left in Van der Merwe’s carriage on the Sunday. She wasn’t crying any more, but she wasn’t very communicative either. Only once, very softly, so that the others wouldn’t hear, she turned to hiss in my ear: “Jan, I won’t ever forgive you for doing this to me.” “Just give it time, Martha,” I pleaded. “Once we have a place of our own to live you’ll soon feel at home again.” “Whatever happens will be your responsibility.” “Obviously.” Perhaps I sounded a trifle too acrimonious, but my nerves were beginning to feel rather frayed.

  Neither Van der Merwe nor the little old man who’d come with him said much, so I had to make an effort to keep the conversation going by telling them about my experiences in the Eastern Cape—enough to make anyone sit up, I’m sure—and everything I’d witnessed in my life as an itinerant teacher. I thought it was wise for them to realize as soon as possible that they’d done well to choose me. Their children would be in good hands, strict but reliable. What a pity they were all girls: education is wasted on females, really. What could Martha show for all her exposure to governesses and finishing school? It certainly was no help to her as a housewife. She couldn’t even feed the baby and we would have to get a slave woman for that purpose: fortunately Van der Merwe had indicated that he had one in milk at his place. However, if I had some success with the Van der Merwe offspring some of the neighbors might be prevailed on to send their sons to me as well. It still meant something of a comedown for me, but after the year with Martha’s family—however kind their intentions—at least it was a new start, independence regained. In the end she, too, could only benefit from it.

  From time to time Van der Merwe made an observation. More often than not it had nothing to do with what I’d just been saying, as if he hadn’t been listening; but I was careful to subscribe to whatever he said—even though he held some startling opinions, especially in connection with slavery at the Cape. Truly an uninformed person; but I preferred not to contradict him at such an early stage: he was my employer and I had to remain in his good books, especially for Martha’s sake. There would be ample opportunity in due course gently to coax him towards a greater degree of enlightenment. I was even beginning to look forward to it.

  “Please don’t worry,” I repeated to Martha when we set out from Du Plessis’s farm on Sunday, hoping
my voice would convince her of my own confidence. “We’re embarking on an entirely new life this week. You should think of it as a great adventure. Not so, Mr D’Alree?”

  The little old man just stared at me in mild bewilderment.

  Barend

  Hester was bloody impossible again that Sunday morning. One of the black moods that just descended on her without any reason on God’s earth; and it wasn’t even the time of the month. We started quarreling the moment we woke up; and when I suggested we drive over to Houd-den-Bek to meet the schoolmaster Nicolaas had gone to fetch for his children she refused point-blank.

  “But it’s Sunday,” I said. “It’s fitting that we should look up the family.”

  “Your family, not mine.”

  “What you need is a damned hiding.”

  “If it’ll make you feel better.”

  “You’re as stubborn as a bloody mare in heat, and that on a Sunday.”

  “And you like to think you’re a good stallion, don’t you?” she countered with that familiar little nasty smirk on her face.

  A low blow; after the night before. And damn it all, it hadn’t been my fault. It was she who’d started the quarrel knowing very well it could only lead to one conclusion. But our brief skirmish that morning did, after all, shed some light on her mood. It had indeed begun with the mare: the beautiful stray mare that had turned up on the farm the Saturday afternoon, a spirited wild creature nobody had seen before. It was Abel who finally managed to corner and catch her, but not without a ferocious struggle and only after being thrown twice (Klaas could kill himself laughing and I had to flick him with my sjambok so that he could stop his nonsense and help Abel subdue the animal); and when at last he brought her back to the yard my stallion broke out of his stable. We had to run for cover as the two horses started cavorting, breaking down everything in their way, right through the fence of the kitchen garden; the wooden lean-to against the shed was kicked to pieces, and they tore a great gap in the quince hedge before, at last, the stallion cornered her against the stonewall between the gate and the stables. For a considerable time they still went on fighting, biting and kicking and rearing; but in the end the mare gave up and the stallion covered her. When I turned round I saw Hester standing in the back door, pressed against the frame as she leaned forward, her fists clenched in her lap; the strands of hair hanging down in front of her ears were moist, and her mouth was half-open. When she saw me she immediately swung round and disappeared into the house. Neither of us referred to it afterwards. But after we’d put out the light that evening, while the smell of oil was still overwhelming in the stuffy darkness behind the closed shutters, she started the bitchy taunts that inevitably led to her forcible subjection. She must have been excited by the horses; and it was carried over to Sunday.

  “Well, if you won’t go I’ll go on my own with the boys,” I said.

  “Pieter is too small.”

  “I said I’m taking the boys with me. It’s up to you whether you want to come with us.”

  I knew she wouldn’t change her mind, of course. Neither would I.

  “Inspan the cart,” I told Abel. “You can come with us on horseback and bring the mare along.”

  “Where are you taking her?” asked Hester, looking piqued at the idea of seeing the animal go.

  “I can’t have the place trampled to pieces again like yesterday. I’ll make enquiries on the way to find out where she came from. Perhaps she belongs to old D’Alree. He’s the only farmer around who’ll let a horse like that run away. I wish he’d pack his bloody junk and leave the Bokkeveld.”

  “Why are you so unreasonable with the poor man?” she asked.

  “In your eyes I’m unreasonable with everybody.” Out of spite I added: “You didn’t think I’d leave the mare behind so you could put the stallion on her again the moment I turned my back, did you?”

  Hester’s cheeks were suffused with the redness of rage; and without another word, without even saying good-bye to the boys, she went into the house.

  We passed by Frans du Toil’s farm without stopping to greet him: I knew the mare wasn’t his, and to off-saddle at his place went against my grain. Only Nicolaas was pusillanimous enough not to want to offend the man even if he couldn’t stand him.

  As it turned out it wasn’t D’Alree’s mare either. Plaatjie Pas told me: he was the only living soul I found at the place, as Campher and Dollie, I presume, had gone somewhere in search of drink again. How a white man could be so thick with a lot of slaves was beyond me.

  Nicolaas wasn’t home yet when we reached Houd-den-Bek.

  “We can wait,” I said. “We’re in no hurry.”

  “Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Cecilia invited me.

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  I sent Abel to stable the mare: Nicolaas could take her over from there. I’d had my share of trouble.

  It became an extraordinarily long day. Cecilia was an exemplary housewife, but she couldn’t offer much in the line of conversation and we’d soon exhausted all that could be said about the harvest, and Nicolaas’s journey, and Pa’s illness, and the children, and the school business. I was beginning to wonder whether it might not be better to go home after all, but that would just be grist to Hester’s mill.

  After dinner we retired for an afternoon nap, Cecilia to her own bedroom and I to the children’s. But I found it too hot to sleep. A deadly silence in the yard. The buzzing of flies inside. The children were playing in the outbuilding prepared for the schoolmaster; later it seemed to me they slipped out to the orchards. They’d been ordered to stay indoors, but I was reluctant in that oppressive heat to go after them: and I remembered our own swimming on such scorching afternoons in the dam at Lagenvlei when I was a child. Without really dozing off, in the heavy stupor following Cecilia’s enormous meal, I abandoned myself to the memory of a lifetime of Sunday afternoons. Those days at the dam. The afternoon I’d tried to force Hester to take off her clothes; and her refusal. The way she’d always resisted me in everything: even her acceptance to marry me had been a way of frustrating me. I remembered our excursions in the veld; in the mountains. The day we’d been surprised by the thunderstorm, when Nicolaas and I had run off ahead of them: and the panic at the thought, afterwards, that she and Galant might have been struck by lightning or something, while in fact they’d been sheltering cozily in Ma-Rose’s hut. Thinking back to it all I had an impression of our growing up among all sorts of threats and dangers—yet we’d got through them all unscathed, until we were here now, so many years later. Safe and secure: only somewhere along the road the sense of adventure had disappeared. Everything had become so even and predictable, and perhaps it was a good thing; perhaps inevitable. But how infinitely less than it might have been if—If what? I couldn’t tell. And yet other possibilities must have existed once. What tremendous event would be required to restore adventure and significance to our lives, to change Hester into one of the possibilities of my life again? Years before there had been the grownups, Pa and Ma—and then us, opposite them: the children who on Sunday afternoons could enjoy themselves at the dam without a care in the world. And now, suddenly, we were the prematurely middle-aged, and the children enjoying themselves were ours. A few more years and it would be their turn again. Would there never be an end to it? And no fulfillment either?

  I tried to restrain the thoughts. Sundays had never been good for me. The inertia made one think too much. All week long one was working hard, and in control of all that happened; and that brought a feeling of security. But on a day like this the world seemed to be slipping through one’s fingers. One no longer knew for sure what was happening in the heavy silence; one felt a stranger in one’s own place, threatened by a panic one couldn’t subdue because it remained beyond comprehension. There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit.

  From outside I once heard Abel’s boi
sterous laughter. What carefree exuberance. In spite of myself, like so many times before, I had to admit that I envied him. How I would have wished to be like that myself!—and I might well have been if I’d not been weighed down by responsibilities from too early an age.

  I remembered the occasion when he’d accompanied me to Cape Town; the exhilarating evenings when he would play his fiddle beside the fire. So far away from home a burden fell from me; some evenings I even joined in the singing, and we took turns with the jug of brandy. But in the end it was always I who had to decide where to stop when things threatened to get out of hand. I was never free to abandon myself completely to the music and merriment like him.

  Afterwards he lost his violin in the Cape. He could give no coherent explanation of the loss. But the truth struck me: it had been his way of spitefully depriving me of something he knew I liked, a slave’s petty manner of correcting his master. And it would forever remain a stumbling block between us. Once, after the upheaval caused by Goliath, he’d even threatened me with a spade. Only momentarily, but that shock of fear would always remain with me. For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. What outrageous thoughts the Sunday afternoon was stirring up in my mind! I felt impotent against the heavy burden of the heat. There seemed to be no end to the day.

  It was sunset before Nicolaas came home at last. The schoolmaster looked a real fart; his wife a slip of a girl with a sweet, strained, harmless face. The baby was whining; Cecilia called the slave woman Pamela to take the child and suckle it.

  We sat down in the voorhuis for coffee and a desultory chat. Old D’Alree came as far as the door, but as soon as he recognized me he offered his apologies and went off again.

  “He’s really becoming a bloody nuisance,” I said to Nicolaas. “There must be a way of getting rid of him.”